Tag: Columbia Journalism School

Weekend Insert

I spent many college weekends at the library. The journalism library.

Work study program (certain publications need to be behind the desk. My desk.)

That P/T job followed two years of working at the campus TV studio.

I keep wondering how many of those communication students made it in the real world.  Has anyone landed on Page One!

After all, we weren’t Columbia Journalism School.

Just a land-grant farm University, whose football coach is still around after almost 4 decades.

(as of this edit, this is no longer true. JoePa was fired yesterday and Happy Valley turned uproar, flipping a CBS-news van on its side).

I realized then that many would go on to marketing and advertising.

A few would move up market, and eventually be settled in metros like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Occasionally, the school bulletin still advertises “insider” job openings for Associate Producer of sports TV, let’s say down in Jacksonville, FL.

But I have a feeling that many of those students who were there at the library on those weekends, are not holding communication-related jobs.

It’s too integrated a field of study. And unless you found a niche (dog food adverts), and honed in, chances are that you would end up in sales, as in my case.

Still, I hope to be surprised by a New York Times book review title, whose author I might recognize. It will be  a happy moment for me. That somehow, my butler-ing at the library on those weekends wasn’t in vain.

Words have always been cheap.

Now even memory (and expertise) faces its own deflation. Just google it.

Consequently, kids just text and invent shorthand that soooo SMS-fitting.

It’s been sequential, for movies to be derived from screen plays which are adapted from books. Now, it’s movies first, then games and cartoon or tie-ins.

If you feel socially awkward to “friend” someone online, maybe because people you actually know already died, or that they are also bewildered in this new social media landscape. Studies show that it’s the 2nd or 3rd degree connectors that somehow influence us most (see Connected, by two Harvard researchers – who found a link between obesity and those we hang out with online).

I didn’t realize then, what I now know, that those minimum-wage hours have been habit-forming for me. I have grown attached to print and the sound/smell of quiet minds at work. I know those same students perhaps still flip the channels to find out how Penn State team is doing (lost to Alabama), and maybe, still read a newspaper during commercials. Nowadays, you can hardly find any publications considered sacred or in short supply enough to be kept behind the desk. Consequently, I wonder if the school of journalism is still keeping a weekend part-timer  just for that.

Filter builder

Building up our filtering capacity does not mean firming up our prejudice. But no matter what we do, we can only watch an average of 4 hours of TV and a few hours on the Web, mobile or stationary.

So we rely on thought leaders. Two-step information flow. Except this time, information flow through a social network i.e. multiple gate-keepers. We essentially recreate what early radio stations did when they strung together broadcast relay stations (to deliver a larger audience to advertisers) with their affiliates.

To be prejudice-free (reaching out only to friends and reading only their posts), I try to connect with a diverse pool, from left, center to right, black white and yellow, male female and gay and straight.

While we die alone, we don’t have to be isolated in our thought life.

In fact, we should recalibrate our filter, to let in more

data of different shapes and sizes. Ours is a post-Columbus Google era and each of us, our own press agent. Some even venture to suggest Social Media profile to replace credit history.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/26/why-your-social-media-profile-might-be-your-next-credit-score/

In 2010 the year in review, they posted a picture showing a naked Haitian woman who contracted cholera, lying and dying on the streets. No one stopped to cover her up (I hope the photographer would, after taking that picture that stirred our conscience).

And remember Nida, dying in front of our Twitter eyes during post Iranian election?

When I was in International Journalism class, we touched briefly on information flow, and how it had always been from North to South, from information-rich countries to information poor ones. Well, that was before YouTube and Twitter.

Now, anyone with a clip or tweet can share. New Dean of Columbia Journalism school, Steve Coll, will have to start a Twitter account to  stay relevant.

I have yet learned how to build a twitter filter. So what harm can it do me, reading unsolicit 140 characters. It would be an equivalence of hearing an elevator pitch from an aggressive salesman, whose odd of success is quite small (because he skips over the discovery phase). But some tweets stick and I learn something new every day. Technology is just a tool to deliver content.  Just don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Do you hear what I hear.